Does Kapil Sibal sleep in the nude?

I am not gay or even bisexual. But all of a sudden, every night this week, I have been having deeply objectionable dreams about Kapil Sibal.

I am not gay or even bisexual. But all of a sudden, every night this week, I have been having deeply objectionable dreams about Kapil Sibal. How objectionable, you ask. Well, let me assure you they have nothing to do with either the 2G scam or the Lokpal bill.

But they were very, very, very, very objectionable. They were so objectionable that I ended up offending my own sentiments, both religious and non-religious. And, dear reader, I am not at all sure I can describe them to you without offending your sentiments too — especially your aesthetic sentiments. So let me put it this way: Imagine Vidya Balan’s role in The Dirty Picture being played by Kapil Sibal, wearing those same costumes, and enacting those same sequences with Naseeruddin Shah and those other fellows. Well, it was sort of like that, but really dirty.

Usually I can never remember my dreams. When I wake up, I have a vague sense that I have had some powerful dreams, but the imagery always escapes me. I am guessing it is some form of censorship at work. But what bothers me now is that this oneiric censorship mechanism has stopped working ever since Kapil Sibal began invading my dreams.

So I have been waking up every morning with high-res images of Kapil Sibal swirling in my brain. And believe me when I say these are really disturbing images, for somehow he never wears anything in my dreams. A fashion writer friend of mine tells me people in dreams are generally seen wearing whatever clothes they go to bed in. So does that mean Sibal sleeps in the nude? Even if he does, does that give him the right to enter my dreams uninvited, and outrage my modesty by displaying those of his assets in which I have no interest whatsoever?

To make it worse, he is never quiet. I know, he is never quiet in real life either. But in my dreams he is forever quoting his own poetry. Two nights ago, for instance, he recited this poem while doing sit-ups:I am Kapil Sibal, and I have a lovely fat ass
And I tell you no offensive comments can you pass
So if you tweet that I’m an idiot or a cretin
I swear you’ll never be allowed to get in.

When I heard it, I was scandalised, but I kept my counsel. But he wanted to know my opinion of his poem. I pointed out that ‘ass’ did not exactly rhyme with ‘pass’. He took offence at my feedback. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘Which world are you in? What matters is how they speak in America, which is where all our policies are made anyway. For Americans, ‘ass’ does rhyme with ‘pass’. You bloody Indians will never get it.’

As you can imagine, scenes like this hardly make for a pleasant dream. Besides, such dreams with adult content were deeply offensive to my satvic sensibility. But I was helpless as I did not know how to suppress Sibal’s night-time incursions into my unconsciousness. So I was quite thrilled when I heard that Sibal was seeking pre-censorship of virtual content.

For those who don’t know, pre-censorship is censoring the content you want to censor even before it comes into existence as content. According to media reports, Sibal met top executives of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and told them to find a way of screening and thus preventing disparaging comments or imagery about himself or his ilk from appearing on the internet. (Normally what happens is they first appear, then some idiot takes offence, and they are taken off.)

One report said Sibal was anxious about pre-censoring ‘obscene images of Indian political leaders.’ I knew instantly what was on his mind. It was the same thing that was on mine. I would not be seeing ‘obscene images of Indian political leaders’ in my dreams if only I had access to some form of pre-censorship, whereby I could censor my dreams before they were dreamed by me. So I was really hoping Sibal would get these executives to do his bidding; find a way to suppress objectionable content before it finds expression. Surely the technology could be developed and applied to dreams too? After all, the dream world is just another form of virtual reality.

But the executives let him down. They told him pre-censorship was impossible because Facebook has 25 million users in India, and Google, 100 million. And Iast I checked, I had about 100 billion neurons in my brain, and on a given night, any one of them could slip a placard into a dream that says, ‘Kapil Sibal is a big fat moron who loves wanking.’ Now, what can I do about that?